种群与进化
In response to increasing threats to biodiversity, conservation objectives have been set at national and international level, with the aim of halting biodiversity decline by reducing direct anthropogenic pressures on species. However, the…
In this paper, we proposed new predator-prey models that take into account memory and kicks. Memory is understood as the dependence of current behavior on the history of past behavior. The equations of these proposed models are…
Urban ecosystems exhibit complex predator-prey dynamics increasingly disrupted by anthropogenic disturbances (e.g., noise, habitat fragmentation). Classical Lotka-Volterra (LV) models fail to capture these human-induced stressors, and…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
Many classes of phylogenetic networks have been proposed in the literature. A feature of several of these classes is that if one restricts a network in the class to a subset of its leaves, then the resulting network may no longer lie within…
Biofilm infections on medical implants are difficult to eradicate because insufficient nutrient availability promotes antibiotic-tolerant persister cells that survive treatment and reseed growth. Existing mathematical models usually omit…
Antibiotic resistance presents a growing global health threat by diminishing the effectiveness of treatments and allowing once-manageable bacterial infections to persist. This study develops and analyzes an optimization-based mathematical…
Recently, a new vector encoding, Ordered Leaf Attachment (OLA), was introduced that represents $n$-leaf phylogenetic trees as $n-1$ length integer vectors by recording the placement location of each leaf. Both encoding and decoding of trees…
We show that a simple mechanistic model of spatial dispersal for settling organisms, subject to parameter variability, can generate heavy-tailed radial probability density functions. The movement of organisms in the model consists of a…
Reconciling increasing food production with biodiversity conservation is critical yet challenging, particularly given global declines in beneficial insects driven by monoculture intensification. Intercropping, the simultaneous or sequential…
Several international agreements have called for the rapid expansion of protected areas to halt biodiversity declines. However, recent research has shown that expanding protected areas may be less cost-effective than redirecting resources…
When formulating a model there is a trade-off between model complexity and (biological) realism. In the present paper we demonstrate how model reduction from a precise mechanistic "super model" to simpler conceptual models using…
Despite the critical role of functional diversity (FD) in understanding ecological systems and processes, its robust quantification remains a significant challenge. A long-held view in the field is that it is not possible to capture its…
The evolutionary biology of aging is fundamental to understanding the mechanisms of aging and how to develop anti-aging treatments. Thus far most evolutionary theory concerns the genetics of aging with limited physiological integration.…
Plants come with sophisticated strategies to survive within a highly competing environment. In addition, they need to resist frequent attacks from a variety of herbivores acting alone, in small groups, or in swarms. Since the amount of…
Infectious pathogens often propagate by superspreading, which focusses onward transmission on disproportionately few infected individuals. At the same time, infector-infectee pairs tend to have more similar transmission potentials than…
Chest X-rays (CXRs) are the most commonly performed imaging investigation. In the UK, many centres experience reporting delays due to radiologist workforce shortages. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools capable of distinguishing normal from…
Consider a tree $T=(V,E)$ with root $\circ$ and edge length function $\ell:E\to\mathbb{R}_+$. The phylogenetic covariance matrix of $T$ is the matrix $C$ with rows and columns indexed by $L$, the leaf set of $T$, with entries…
A central question in evolutionary biology is how to quantitatively understand the dynamics of genetically diverse populations. Modeling the genotype distribution is challenging, as it ultimately requires tracking all correlations (or…
We examine population structures for their ability to maintain diversity in neutral evolution. We use the general framework of evolutionary graph theory and consider birth-death (bd) and death-birth (db) updating. The population is of size…